If you've been anywhere near fitness social media this month, you've seen the story: at Hyrox Beijing in mid-September, a 24-year-old world-record holder won the women's solo race in just over an hour — while her gut gave out on her, visibly, mid-race. She kept going. She won. The internet split between calling her the toughest athlete alive and demanding disqualification, and Hyrox's co-founder apologized for not stepping in during the race. There's now an actual rule covering it.
Let's be clear about one thing before going further: what happened to her can happen to any endurance athlete, and she deserves the respect she's getting for finishing. But since Hyrox is the fastest-growing race format in the world right now and half the people reading this have one on the calendar, it's worth explaining what her race made vivid: hybrid racing is uniquely rough on your digestive system — and everything downstream of it, hemorrhoids included.
"Runner's gut" is real, documented physiology. During hard exercise, your body shunts blood away from the digestive tract toward working muscles and skin. Starve the gut of blood flow for an hour and it gets irritated — cramping, urgency, and for an unlucky percentage of racers, diarrhea in the middle of an event. Add the mechanical jostling of running, pre-race nerves, caffeine, and sugary race fuel, and you have the classic recipe. Marathoners have known this forever; every major race has porta-potty lines to prove it.
Hyrox alternates eight 1-kilometer runs with eight strength stations — sled pushes, sled pulls, farmer's carries, sandbag lunges, wall balls. Here's the part that matters for this blog: nearly every one of those stations is a brace-and-push movement. You take a big breath, lock your core, and drive — which spikes pressure inside your abdomen the same way straining on the toilet does. That intra-abdominal pressure bears down directly on the veins of the pelvic floor and anal canal.
So a Hyrox race hits you from two directions at once: the running irritates the gut, and the lifting repeatedly pressurizes the exact vascular real estate where hemorrhoids live. Neither one "causes" hemorrhoids by itself in a single race. But if you're already prone to them, an hour of alternating gut distress and max-effort bracing is about as concentrated a stress test as your backside can get.
To answer the question the whole internet asked: no, a bout of race-day diarrhea is not good for hemorrhoids. Loose, urgent, repeated stools are one of the classic aggravators — the frequent passing irritates the anal canal, the urgency means bearing down, and the cleanup afterward chafes skin that's already inflamed. That's true whether it happens dramatically on a race course or privately at home the morning after. If existing hemorrhoids were part of the picture, a day like that is exactly how a flare starts.
Swelling, burning, or that familiar tender lump in the days after a hard race responds to the standard playbook: sitz baths once or twice daily, water and fiber back up to full strength, and no straining. For the pain itself, a topical like Advanced Hemorrhoid Cream — 5% lidocaine to temporarily numb the sting, phenylephrine to help temporarily shrink swollen tissue — keeps you moving while things settle. That's temporary symptom relief while your body does the healing; it isn't a fix for whatever your gut did on course.
And know the line: diarrhea that persists beyond a couple of days, blood that's more than streaks on paper, severe or worsening pain, or GI trouble that shows up at every single race is a see-a-doctor situation, not a push-through-it one. Race-day gut chaos is common; recurring gut chaos deserves an actual workup.
Hyrox's new rule will handle the course. Your prep handles the rest.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. Talk to a healthcare provider about any persistent or concerning symptoms.